People have information on how they’ll vote, but also about how others in their community may vote. AP Photo/Wong Maye-E Mirta Galesic, University of Potsdam and Wändi Bruine de Bruin, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences Most public opinion polls correctly predicted the winning candidate in the 2020 […] Read more »
Trump’s Repeat Performance With Late-Deciding Voters
Among the many moving parts of elections, the behavior of undecided voters can be among the toughest to suss out. Some don’t make up their minds until the last few days of a campaign, even on the last day. Some never do and either don’t vote at all or skip […] Read more »
Political Polling Is Still Terrible … and Might Get Worse
Is the polling industry in crisis? And, perhaps more importantly, what does it mean for our democracy if we can’t trust information telling us what our fellow citizens think? Bloomberg The OPINION TODAY email newsletter is a concise daily rundown of significant new poll results and insightful analysis. It’s FREE. Sign up here: opiniontoday.substack Read more »
Mixed Patterns in Job Approval for Defeated Incumbents
Unofficial vote counts indicate Donald Trump has become the fourth U.S. incumbent president defeated for reelection in the Gallup polling era. Gallup will release its first postelection approval rating on Trump in the coming days. His final preelection approval rating was 46%, which ranks as the highest for a defeated […] Read more »
Polling isn’t broken. But we too often miss its hidden signals.
… Human brains and eyes naturally gravitate to margins — because margins quickly summarize the data. But like all summaries, they can obscure, or ignore, important information. There’s a difference between a contest where a candidate leads 53 percent to 45 percent, with 2 percent undecided, and one where the […] Read more »
It’s important to ask why 2020 polls were off. It’s more important to ask what will happen next.
… Polling isn’t built to be an instrument that correctly identifies the winner in a race that comes down to one or two percentage points. It’s meant to roughly evaluate the views of a population with predictable margins of error. Those margins are reduced when polls are averaged, but we […] Read more »